Harvard student Joe Ford, who suffers from cerebral palsy, has written an excellent article on Terri Schaivo’s case. Joe is somewhat irritated that a doctor once tried to put him out of his misery, too.
“Misery can only be removed from the world by painless extermination of the miserable.â€
—a Nazi writer quoted by Robert J. Lifton in The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
Joe points out that it’s not just “right wing Christians” protesting the court decisions on Terri Schiavo to remove her feeding tube and let her starve to death. At least 20 groups devoted to disability rights are also protesting the decisions.
The reason for this public support of removal from ordinary sustenance, I believe, is not that most people understand or care about Terri Schiavo. Like many others with disabilities, I believe that the American public, to one degree or another, holds that disabled people are better off dead. To put it in a simpler way, many Americans are bigots.
Yeah, that’s in-your-face, but Joe is right. I have no place in determining whether somebody else is better off dead.
Besides being disabled, Schiavo and I have something important in common, that is, someone attempted to terminate my life by removing my endotracheal tube during resuscitation in my first hour of life. This was a quality-of-life decision: I was simply taking too long to breathe on my own, and the person who pulled the tube believed I would be severely disabled if I lived, since lack of oxygen causes cerebral palsy. (I was saved by my family doctor inserting another tube as quickly as possible.) The point of this is not that I ended up at Harvard and Schiavo did not, as some people would undoubtedly conclude. The point is that society already believes to some degree that it is acceptable to murder disabled people.
Joe goes on to point out that, like in the opening quote, Nazi Germany believed that terminating the life of the disabled was humanitarian, too. Do we really want to go down that path?
We should err on the side of life. Each and every time.
* Via a tip from Powerline.
Chasing the Wind 
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